David Bestué, Susana Solano and Julia Spínola

CarrerasMugica is pleased to present, from 16 December, 2022 to 28 February 2023, Café con leche, piña, huevo con jitomate, cebolla y cilantro [White coffee, pineapple, eggs with tomato, onion and cilantro], an exhibition of works by the artists David Bestué, Susana Solano and Julia Spínola, curated by Jorge Satorre.

Given my lack of experience, the best way I found to resolve the invitation to conceive this exhibition was to think about selecting the artists and the staging as if it were someone else making the decisions. It would be expected that a work of mine as an artist was included, which finally didn’t happen, but since I get to choose the reason, I will say that it’s because I forgot. The work in question doesn’t exist but there is something real about the exercise; I know where it would emerge from and I would probably be working on it right now if my time wasn’t taken up with this exhibition, which, I repeat, is not about that work which I won’t be showing, nor is it a replacement for it nor the result of it.

The point of departure, if I do manage to make that work someday, will be the conversations I often have with my mum over the phone about what we eat: she tells me and I tell her if we cook something tasty or it if didn’t turn out as well as we had hoped, or if it was a bit too heavy; what we are planning to cook at the weekend, or if we have come across a recipe that looks promising. We discuss whether the avocadoes we eat are from Michoacán or Málaga, where they also grow really good mangoes, though not as good as the “Manila” ones that we have in Mexico, and that La Axarquía is running out of water because they have replaced rainfed crops with tropical ones.

These conversations are anything but trivial because, deep down, I truly believe that we are talking about how my mum’s and my organs react to what we decide to feed them and, by sharing what we eat, our insides synchronize for a moment. I think that the range of distances implied in any decision (in this case the possible production of a work of art) is a way of getting closer and becoming so near that you pierce the skin and reach all that we cannot see nor control within ourselves, though at once it also means taking a greater distance from many other aspects.

-Jorge Satorre